"When somebody says it's not about the money, it's about the money."

"If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl."

"Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy."

"The Jews could be put down very plausible as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered they lack any of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display."

"There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong."

"Historian: an unsuccessful novelist."

"The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work stretch out in the sun and scratch himself."

"There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident."

"Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man."

"Morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Obedience is doing what is told regardless of what is right."

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."

"When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before."

"After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations."

"Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it."

"The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on - I am not too sure."

"Before one may scare the plain people one must first have a firm understanding of the bugaboos that most facilely alarm them. One must study the schemes that have served to do it in the past, and one must study very carefully the technic of the chief current professionals."

"Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in."

"Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop."

"Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly."

"A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman."

"American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant."

"No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man."

"A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers."

"The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots."

"Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious."

"Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon."

"You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something."

"The only really happy folk are married women and single men."

"Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time."

"I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time."

"Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest."

"You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth."

"It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man."

"Unionism seldom if ever uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work."

"Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago."

"The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom."

"There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese."

"Every man is his own hell."

"To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!"

"The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men."

"A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child."

"The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated."

"Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what sting is justice."

"A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them."

"In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms."

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

"An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup."

"Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body."

"Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong."

"Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse."